snippets from my sewing room

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Panda Bag, made by Mouse

My three sewing goals for the next year are (1) to use up my stash (2) to make sense of my scraps and (3) to finish my UFOs.

I have started a spreadsheet to list the projects I have either in progress, or for which I have already purchased material and/or pattern, even if not yet started. So far… I have 39 items on my sheet. That I’ve been able to think of. I’m sure there’s more. Yikes.

Recently, I’ve been reading a book called The One Thing by Gary Keller. The premise, as you can probably guess, is that if you want to be successful in anything — job, life, relationships, hobbies — you should find The One Thing you most need to do, and make sure you do that thing each day. Applying this to sewing, it really means that, instead of scattering my resources across numerous projects, and making a little progress of a lot of them, but not completing any… I should instead set aside each day some time to work on one project until it’s finished. Or at the very least, have two I’m alternating between (because you know how sometimes you want to sew, but you’re sick of what you’re currently working on?). I need to stop being a Starter and become a Completionist.

Thus, when the Mouse asked to do some sewing with me, I decided that this was the weekend to finish her Panda Bag. It’s a project she bought fabric and pattern for quite some time ago — maybe a year or two? — but we had never finished. I knew we could finish it up this weekend, and that would mean that she could take it to Show-and-Tell at guild this month (which she would love to do). It would also get the incomplete item out of my sewing cupboard.

A good thing about waiting so long to finish this project is, she has matured a little, and her fabric tastes have changed. She had initially picked a bright green fabric with golden honey bees on it as the contrast fabric for the bag, even though I had advised her otherwise. Seeing at it again after a break, she decided that the bright green looked wrong — happily, we were able to find a mellower, more sedate green fabric in my stash, and substitute it in. The bee fabric will be reused for something else.

It was fun to work on together — she did quite a bit of the work, though she was a bit nervous about sewing 1/8″ seams and top-stitching, so I did those parts. Now she has something for Show-and-Tell, and I can mark something on The Spreadsheet as COMPLETE!